Jürgen
Habermas’s death prompted me to revisit his books, something I hadn’t done in
many years. At a time when even thinkers of his stature risk being forgotten
almost overnight, I felt I owed him something like an “anti-tribute” (just as
he himself had done to Herbert Marcuse on the occasion of the latter’s
seventieth birthday).
At
the turn of the century, when I was an undergraduate in philosophy, Habermas was one
of the major intellectual figures you had to reckon with, whether you agreed
with him or not. Immersed as I was in the alter-globalization movement, his
proceduralism struck me as arid and uninspiring. The (Hegelian) intuition that
“the unity of reason only remains perceptible in the plurality of its voices”
clearly resonated with those of us who came of age in Seattle and Porto Alegre. Yet the framing of the market and the state as inescapable “subsystems” of a modern, democratic life – pathological perhaps, but only ever to be contained by the lifeworlds they
ceaselessly colonize – clashed with our conviction that another world, beyond the
logic of the commodity, was truly possible.
Later,
while writing my thesis on Adorno in the second half of the 2000s, I found
myself rebelling against the official (and, to my mind, biased) narrative that
Habermas’s so-called “communicative turn” had managed to supplant the dark,
irredeemable pessimism of the first generation of the Frankfurt School by
replacing the philosophy of consciousness underlying it with language-mediated
intersubjective understanding.
In
that version of the story, what was partly a strategic overstatement in Dialectic
of Enlightenment – namely, that the demythologization of nature through
calculation ultimately produces new mythologies (fascism, the culture industry)
– is elevated into the key to interpreting early Critical Theory’s take
on modernity. This reading overlooks the extent to which Adorno himself (as
well as Marcuse) continuously qualified that claim: Enlightenment harbors
contradictory potentials; its authoritarian forms are historically mediated,
not metaphysically necessary; bourgeois society – or rather, the bourgeoisie –
generates emancipatory ideals (liberty, equality, fraternity) while
simultaneously blocking their realization, a blockage political and social in
nature, not logical. And this contradiction also fuels struggles aimed at
expanding the scope of those ideals. Despite the customary readings of his work,
Adorno never lost sight of the fact that capitalist society produces tendencies
– reification, instrumental reason, colonial structures – that remain open to
contestation, however far-fetched that may seem at times and however thoroughly
administered the world appeared in his own time.
Habermas’s
critique of Heidegger is, in this respect, deeply consonant with Adorno’s own
dialectical thinking of the 1950s and 60s. It represents a decisive attempt to
rescue modernity from its reduction to a single, monolithic logic of
domination. Against Heidegger’s diagnosis of technological rationality as an
all-encompassing “enframing” (Gestell), Habermas insists on a
differentiation internal to modern reason itself: alongside instrumental
calculation, there persists an orientation toward meaning and mutual
understanding, and this dialectical structure is what allows modern thought to
avoid a one-sided identification with domination and instead grounds its claim
to reason (“legitimacy”, in Habermas’s terms) in its own reflexive openness.
Yet
this very openness introduces a tension that runs throughout Habermas’s work.
In distancing himself from the more “expressivist” currents of the 1960s –
above all the legacy of Marcuse – Habermas draws a sharp distinction between
protest and critique. Protest, he argues, sharpens experience but does not yet
amount to knowledge; critique alone provides the conceptual tools required to
grasp social reality. While analytically useful, this distinction risks
obscuring the mediated character of experience itself. Expression and analysis
are not identical, but neither are they separable in any strict sense: critique
emerges from historically formed experience, and experience is already
structured by contradictions that demand interpretation.
A
similar difficulty appears in Habermas’s treatment of ideology critique. By
shifting the focus from historically specific forms of domination to the
procedural conditions of undistorted communication, ideology becomes a
quasi-transhistorical phenomenon. To be sure, one must not confuse the unmasking of the objective
spirit through Ideologiekritik with a theory of society in advanced (or
post-industrial) capitalism; yet detached
from a substantive critical account of the latter, the critique of ideologies loses
its historical sharpness. Here, in any case, the contrast with Adorno is stark,
for whom ideology is inseparable from the social totality that produces it.
This
divergence becomes most visible in Habermas’s accusation that Adorno’s
aphoristic claims – “there can be no right life in the wrong one”, “the whole
is the untrue” – amount to performative contradictions. Habermas’s argument is
that if one can assert something universally, one already presupposes the
validity conditions one denies. Yet consciousness of living within a false
totality does not amount to resolving that falsity; on the contrary, it reveals
the gap between conceptual totalization and the irreducible “non-identical”
that resists it. The “whole” is untrue not because universality as such is
impossible, but because actually existing universality – the universality of
capital – falsely presents itself as complete.
Adorno once remarked that historical dialectics
sometimes grants greater actuality to what appears anachronistic than to what
claims contemporaneity through its smooth functioning within existing
apparatuses. Few observations better capture the fate of Critical Theory after
its classical moment. What is conventionally presented as an advance – a gain
in normative clarity, a refinement of moral grammar, an adaptation to
democratic institutions, an escape from the aporias of radical negativity –
coincides, in crucial respects, with a theoretical regression.
What recedes in Habermas’s recasting of the first
generation’s insights is precisely capitalism grasped as a historical totality.
In its place emerges a moralized social theory increasingly attuned to the
self-descriptions of liberal modernity. The first generation’s stubborn refusal
of normative closure – so often dismissed as pessimistic, elitist, or obsolete
– appears today in a different light: Adorno’s insistence on non-identity,
Marcuse’s wager on historical rupture, even their speculative excesses, read
less like relics of a bygone Fordist epoch than like oblique anticipations of a
world in which systemic (dis)integration has outpaced the reconciliatory discourses that absorb its contradictions into the grammar of legitimacy. What is now labeled anachronistic is
precisely what resists translation into the operational vocabularies of
governance, law, and moral consensus.
At
this point, however, the very tension within Habermas’s own theory – partly
obscured by this historical shift – comes into view. As Peter Dews has argued,
communicative action contains an “anarchistic” core: in principle, every truth
claim is open to challenge, no authority is beyond question, no consensus is
final. This radical openness threatens any attempt at stabilization. Habermas’s
later turn to law, civil society, and deliberative institutions can thus be
read as an effort to render this radical openness socially sustainable, to
translate critique into procedures and norms capable of maintaining integration
in complex societies.
This
translation, however, comes at a cost. By privileging consensus-oriented forms
of institutionalization, Habermas ends up domesticating the critical potential
his own theory unleashes. The problem, of course, is not institutionalization
as such: large-scale oligarchic structures like the European Union tend toward
lobbyist mediation, bureaucratic stabilization, and general depoliticization,
even when they preserve formal channels of participation, but workers’
organizations (unions, councils, grassroots formations) can, by contrast,
function as vehicles of conflict, sites where antagonism is articulated and
organized.
The
concept of an “oppositional public sphere”, developed by Oskar Negt and
Alexander Kluge in critical engagement with Habermas’s work, foregrounds
fragmented, experience-based counter-publics rooted in labor and everyday life;
arenas that do not aim at immediate consensus but organize and sustain conflict,
and within which the working class finds the means to translate its interests,
existential aspirations, and insurgent energies into political form. The
decisive question then is not whether critique becomes institutionalized, but
how: which forms of organization preserve the antagonistic energy of critique,
and which absorb it into existing structures of domination.
To
sum up: read against the grain, Habermas’s work retains a certain actuality.
Communicative rationality produces a standing surplus of critique over any
institutional form that seeks to contain it. Yet a “will to stabilization” runs
through his thought and surfaces in a number of unfortunate political
positions: support for the first Gulf War as a means of consolidating an
international rule of law; endorsement of NATO’s intervention in the Balkans
not only to halt genocide but to stabilize the Euro-Atlantic alliance; and,
finally, a strong defense of Israel’s right to self-defense. In the latter
case, Habermas grounds his stance in Germany’s historically constituted
responsibility for the singular crime of the Shoah, which, he argues, entails a
special obligation to secure Israel’s existence, elevating its right to defense
beyond a matter of international law to a morally charged commitment bound up
with the preservation of the postwar normative order.
While
it is not entirely unfair to say that the refusal of stabilization – let us
say, in Adorno’s negative dialectics – threatens to dissolve critique into
ineffectual negativity, it should by now also be clear that attempts to
stabilize meaning and secure consensus risk blunting critique altogether. The
task, then, is not to choose between openness and order, but to sustain forms
of social organization in which critique remains both effective and irreducibly
unsettling.
